30 Day Kaiju Challege Day 8: Tentacles
The eighth entry in my take on the 30 Day Kaiju Challenge. Uggggggggh, tentacles. On the one hand, they are great practice since I draw a lot of monsters with long, curving, serpentine tails and/or bodies, which means I need to get good at drawing those on my tablet. On the other, URGH, my tablet hates drawing long, curving, serpentine shapes! Its primitive robot brain just cannot handle it. Add in the complexity of doing more than one of such shapes and you have a layer of hell.
But the main point of this exercise is to practice drawing by tablet, so here we are.
One of my oldest OC kaiju is a giant octopus named lusca (which is the name of a cryptid giant octopus as well). He's basically cannon fodder, and mainly exists as an homage to several other giant octopus monsters from film - most of which appear right the hell out of nowhere without any explanation. Lusca has the dubious honor of hanging around in my kaiju-verse despite having a bland design simply because of his seniority, and for the past few years I've been trying to justify his existence outside of my nostalgia. So I took this as an opportunity to revamp Lusca into something new.
Then I got stumped. There are a lot of cephalopod monsters out there, and many of the good ideas are taken. Figuring out something new to do with this beastie without removing the "octopus monster" vibe I cherish so much was difficult.
However, much like the beetle monster I made for entry number 6, a fan design I made provided an answer. I'm pretty attached to my Cthulhu design (as seen in ICHF) - I think it's a very solid and interesting looking critter. I also know I'll never use it for anything substantial, because I cannot write good Lovecraft style stories. So that design just sits there in limbo, never to be used for anything more than an occasional unnecessary visual for a long winded pseudo-essay.
Why not fuse it with Lusca, then? I could take some of its best bits and plop them on Lusca, and as long as I don't take any of the super alien bits - like the six eyes or the vaguely angelic body layout - it could still pass as terrestrial cephalopod monster, albeit a really weird one. And that's what I did.
Thus we have Kutulusca, the deep sea kraken who diverged from octopi and squids eaons ago to evolve into its own monstrous leviathan form. While appearing to only have six tentacles, the great mollusc actually sports several dozen, most of which can extend or retract from a pouch over its mouth. With retractable venomous stingers and an aggressively predatory nature, Kutulusca is one of the deadliest sea monsters around.
